


Heavy are the mountains

by burgundians



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 16:33:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9393803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burgundians/pseuds/burgundians
Summary: It's two years after the war when Harry Potter tracks Credence Barebone to a house in Maine.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Don’t be afraid to suffer; return that heaviness to the earth’s own weight; heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas. - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Credence Barebone collects things. Some are shiny and eye-catching, others are little more than worthless knick knacks. Harry could relate, he did the same thing. A cracked mirror, years worth old knitted jumpers, stacks of letters. He doesn't quite know what he's collecting now but he doesn't feel like he'll stop any time soon. At one point, when he started this whole thing he thought he was looking for answers, but he keeps going back and back, to the start. Everything starts with Albus Dumbledore.

He walks carefully, Harry notices, as the elderly man places the small tray on the coffee table between them. It's another thing he recognizes in himself and it shocks him for a moment, that he will never have the relaxed unawareness his age should entail.

"So, how can I help you?" Mr. Barebone gives him a small smile and Harry connects then the face he saw in the grainy photograph, hidden away in an old file. Credence had been beautiful then and in a way, older and less haunted, still is.

"To be completely honest, I don't really know. I'm..." Harry stops himself, thinking how to answer. "I'm on a journey, I guess"

"For what?"

"Answers." He doesn't say he doesn't have the questions, but from Mr. Barebone's raised eyebrow he imagines he understands.

And so they talk. Harry tells him about himself, his life, all the parts he usually keeps hidden within himself, because Mr Barebone _understands_. And it’s freeing to talk to someone who holds no expectations, who’s seen everything before, who has no interest in him beyond this conversation. It’s not something he’s ever told anyone, especially not Ron, but when he’s at his lowest, he’s been known to hit a random pub and bare his soul to the poor muggle unfortunate enough to be sitting next to him.

It may be the house. After much searching, Harry had found Credence Barebone in Maine. No part of it had been easy. Mr. Barebone himself is a ghost in the files from Grindelwald’s War. As though there was some prudishness to name him, some secret shame. The old man in front of him seems harmless but Harry knows from Tina Scamander that he almost leveled a fair bit of New York.

All that power hidden away in New England countryside.

It’s a very nice house. Not like the Potter House in Gloucestershire he discovered he owned after the war, grey and solid and almost foreboding, amidst the overgrown trees. Mr. Barebone’s house is made of wood, like the Americans like so much, with a porch in the front and a brick chimney. It was inherited some years ago and that’s how Harry tracked him down.

He sees the porch again on one of the many, many black and white photographs scattered throughout the room. A striking middle-aged man in shirtsleeves is shown sitting on the same steps Harry walked up thirty minutes ago, and he pauses the slow drag of his cigarette to raise his eyebrow at him.

Mr. Barebone notices his line of sight and gives a tight smile.

“That was a long time ago.”

It wasn’t, not really, and they both know that. Harry wonders if he’ll hoard his silence and his years and those small ephemeral moments to himself too. Maybe one day he will, but he’s young yet, as young as the Credence he found in the archives of the Ministry of Magic.

“How is Tina Scamander?” It’s Mr. Barebone that breaks the silence and at his curious look, continues. “I figured she’d have something to do with this.”

“She did. And she’s well.” His mouth forms a genuine smile.

“Tina is a very good person, one of the best I’ve ever met.” He raises himself from the couch to head towards the old upright piano. “She was the first person to…” He stops himself. “To do me a kindness.”

His spindly fingers grab one of the picture frames before setting it down again.

It’s a nice house, Harry thinks, but oddly empty despite all the knick knacks and mementos. Credence Barebone looks like someone who has been grievously wronged many times, but settled into his sadness.

“Is it lonely?” It’s not what he means to say but it’s been a conversation of silences and hidden things and Harry has always done better with confrontation. He’s been wronged too and he’s tired of things gone unsaid.

“I don’t mind.” _Loneliness cannot hurt you_ , he thinks and for a second, Credence Barebone sounds so very young.

Harry is young, but doesn’t feel like it. He doesn’t know how young or old he is anymore since… How does one count time after death, he has asked himself. Was he born when his mother birthed him, or was it much later? Was he reborn in the Forbidden Forest, maybe?

At the heart of it all though, is weather his life was ever his at all. He has served his purpose and lived. In the end it always comes back to Dumbledore, still pulling the strings of his life from beyond the dead.

“You look lost, young man.” Mr. Barebone says, peering at him over his coffee cup.

“I don’t think I was ever found.” It’s possibly the most honest he’s ever been.

Mr. Barebone doesn’t have the answers and he doesn’t have the questions. He’s not quite sure what to do with himself. He could keep going, hiding himself away in archives and libraries and the long empty Potter House until he goes back to the very beggining. And then what?

He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he finally accepts that there is nothing left. No plan, no threads of fate being woven. He keeps locking himself away in dark houses and pouring over old letters written by dead people. He knows he can’t live like this forever. He knows he’s locking himself away from the people who love him.

“I don’t know what to do.” The silence is defeaning.

A world crashed into by people like him, hurt young men, himself, Dumbledore, Voldemort, Snape, even old Credence Barebone, as quiet and discrete as he had been, slinking through the cracks of History. It’s so horrifying and unfair, it makes him want to scream. Callous cruelty, all of it.

“Then don’t. Your life is yours and you don’t owe anybody anything.” Harry needed that brutal honesty, he realizes, when Mr. Barebone sits next to him without touching. Not for the first time, he thinks they understand each other.


End file.
